How PerfectTed replaced HubSpot and unified teams in Notion

PerfectTed moved from a fragmented setup — where tools and assets lived across multiple platforms and each department had its own systems — to a unified Notion workspace that fully replaced HubSpot, with standardized hubs adopted company-wide.

Patreon has redefined how creators connect with their audiences — offering a space where they can share exclusive work, build community, and generate sustainable income without relying on ads or algorithms. It’s a platform designed for direct, meaningful relationships.

But behind the scenes, even teams working on products like this can run into workflows that don’t fully support their pace.

Client Snapshot

Headquarters

London, United Kingdom

Founded

2021

Industry

Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) / Food & Beverage

Company size

100 people

Tools

Notion, Excel, HubSpot CRM, SharePoint, Teams, Outlook, Elm, Xero, Unleashed, NetStock, Otter/Fixer

PerfectTed is the world’s largest matcha brand, on a mission to make matcha accessible to everyone. Founded in 2021, it has grown from a kitchen-table idea to 30,000+ stores across 50+ countries. It was named the UK’s fastest-growing founder-led business and the fastest-growing retail brand in the UK (FEBE Growth 100, 2025).

PerfectTed also won investment on Dragons’ Den, including backing from Steven Bartlett (for fun: Steven Bartlett’s Dragons’ Den Investment ‘PerfectTed’ Becomes Show’s Most Valuable Deal Ever Hitting $200m Valuation).

They're a fast-moving startup selling through UK retail, food service, international exports, and e-commerce. When they came to Optemization, they were expanding into new markets, evolving their product line, and hiring fast.

Their team of ~100 people spans Marketing, Leadership, Sales, Operations, Finance, Product Development (NPD), E-commerce, Global Markets, HR, and Business Operations. They needed a workspace that could keep up.

The Challenge

PerfectTed was scaling fast — and the systems supporting that growth were ready for an upgrade.

Each department had built up its own mix of tools over time, shaped by what was available when they needed it.

📁 Assets were "everywhere and nowhere"

Files distributed across SharePoint, Google Drive, iCloud, and personal devices. Finding the latest version of an asset often meant cross-checking with a colleague — the tools didn't make it easy to know where the source of truth lived.

👀 Zero cross-department visibility

Sales closing a new listing? Operations needed to know about packaging, volumes, and launch dates. But that info traveled by email and WhatsApp — no centralized place to check.

📊 Project management lived outside any shared system

The tools didn’t make it easy to standardize projects (templates, dependencies, capacity), so planning stayed fragmented. Marketing's annual plan lived in an Excel spreadsheet outside of Notion.

🚫 Sales had never logged into Notion

Waiting for expert help, with no workspace to call their own. The Sales hub was a blank slate — literally.

⚠️ Operations: zero adoption

A growing team tracking tasks via email, Teams, and physical notebooks. Many had never even opened Notion.

🧹 The original workspace had been outgrown

Without a centralized personal view, team members filled the gap with their own systems — notebooks, shared lists, external apps.

“We need to create a space that is very intuitive, not overcomplicated, that enables individuals and managers to get an overview of what are the projects we're focused on."

— Kelly Shaw, Head of Marketing

“From a sales perspective, we haven't had this sort of hub built yet… we've been advised to wait until we've worked with you."

— Shani Higgs, Head of Sales

“The foundational core of where projects and tasks are managed, where information is stored, and the linking between Sales and Operations — that is the ultimate number one."

— Emily Elviss, Finance & Strategy Manager

They didn’t need minor tweaks. They needed a full-scale workspace transformation — and a partner who could keep up.

Everything was buried: Projects lived inside franchises, tasks inside projects, subtasks inside tasks. Checking the status of a single episode meant clicking through multiple layers of toggles — the opposite of a streamlined workspace.

Episode creation was entirely manual: The supervising producer duplicated templates by hand, looked up open publish dates in Google Calendar, and plugged in deadlines from memory — every single time, plus, changing due dates was practically impossible because how confusing everything was.
Status updates weren't happening: The process of clicking into each subtask to change its status felt so tedious that most tasks showed "Not Started" even when they were clearly done.
Filtering was broken: The associate producer couldn't distinguish between shorts that were finished editing and subtasks that happened to share the same "Done" label — making it impossible to find what was ready to publish.
Information was scattered across multiple tools and needed to be consolidated: Publish dates lived in both Notion and Google Calendar. Production logs lived in Google Docs. Review links lived in Dropbox Replay. Nothing was connected.
The team lived in Slack: Version handoffs, review requests, and status check-ins all happened through DMs, because Notion notifications were too noisy to be useful.
There were no personal dashboards: Without a centralized personal view, team members filled the gap with their own systems — notebooks, shared lists, external apps.

“The worry is that we’ll build this thing and nobody will use it. But I think if we build something that works for us, people will be more likely to use it.”

— John P., Supervising Producer

✨ And yet — the team wasn't resistant to Notion. They were eager. They just needed a system designed around how they actually work.

"I feel like there’s a lot of power in Notion that I’ve never really tapped into. I hear so much about it, and I’d like to unlock some of its potential."

— Colin M., Video Editor & Producer

How it started: The Design Sprint

Optemization kicked things off with a Design Sprint.

Over one week, the team interviewed department heads across the entire organization:

Interviewee

Role

Department

Kelly Shaw

Head of Marketing

Marketing

Shani Higgs

Head of Sales

Sales

Emily Elviss & Charlotte Fairman

Finance & Strategy Manager / Finance Manager

Finance & Operations

Camila Castiblanco

NPD Manager

Product Development

Interviewee

Role

Department

Kelly Shaw

Head of Marketing

Marketing

Shani Higgs

Head of Sales

Sales

Emily Elviss & Charlotte Fairman

Finance & Strategy Manager / Finance Manager

Finance & Operations

Camila Castiblanco

NPD Manager

Product Development

Each conversation mapped current workflows, tools, pain points, and wishlist items from the ground up. The sprint wasn't just about Notion — it was about understanding how PerfectTed actually worked: how information flowed between teams, how handoffs broke down, and where the biggest opportunities lived.

The deliverable was a comprehensive scope document with 12 recommendations ready for immediate implementation and 10 future opportunities requiring further discovery.

The team was then transitioned into Optemization's LaunchHQ framework — an ongoing Workspace Development engagement designed for organizations that need sustained, hands-on build support.

What Optemization built

PerfectTed moved into an ongoing Workspace Development engagement on Optemization's Engineering Plan. Over 7 months, 17+ projects shipped.

🏗️ Foundation first

Before any hubs could go live, the workspace needed a structural overhaul.

Workspace Architecture & Permissions

Cleaned up duplicate databases, established access controls and workspace governance (private teamspaces for Finance and Senior Leadership Team, ownership documentation), and reorganized the sidebar from hard to navigate to navigable.

“The idea with the Notion revamp or the new PerfectTed HQ is to have a single entry point”

Notion Training & Onboarding

Beginner training for Ops (who'd never logged in), embedded workspace guides, and hands-on onboarding during each department rollout.

🏠 Department Hubs: Every team gets a home

The centerpiece: a series of standardized department hub rollouts. Know your way around one hub? You can navigate them all.

Marketing Teamspace Rollout

Rebuilt from scratch. Clean project dashboard, organized docs, sub-team areas for Branding, Campaigns, Content, and Events, plus a content calendar replacing fragmented Excel plans. Timeline dependencies adjust downstream tasks when deadlines shift.

Sales Rollout

Built from zero. Structured by channel: UK Retail, Out of Home, Export. Dead simple — account managers can track everything without overwhelm.

Finance Team Rollout

Finance was deployed as a fully public teamspace — a deliberate choice that matched PerfectTed's collaborative culture, with selective access controls on sensitive pages. Part of the work was change management: helping the team understand how permissions work across a shared workspace while keeping their sensitive data protected.

NPD Team Rollout

Product development pipeline connected to tasks across Ops, Sales, and Marketing. Every product stage visible to every team.

Leadership Rollout

High-level visibility across all departments. Replaced manual updates via Teams, WhatsApp, and email with a single leadership dashboard.

Ops Team Rollout

From email + physical notebooks to a fully structured hub with project management, task tracking, and cross-department communication.

Business Operations Rollout

Company-wide operational processes — policies, procedures, hiring, office requests, and team coordination — all in one hub.

⚡ Specialized Builds

Beyond the department rollouts, three standout builds became central to how PerfectTed operates: the Deals Database (a full HubSpot replacement), the Product Management Database, and the Relationship Manager. A few other targeted builds addressed specific pain points from the Design Sprint:

Relationship Manager

CRM-style tracking for contacts, companies, and activity history — with categorization, follow-ups, and project linking built right into Notion.

Product Management Database

Product lifecycle management connecting records to projects, tasks, and cross-functional workflows. One source of truth.

“I think everybody’s ready and willing for these changes. There’s a big appetite to use a tool. People feel that Notion can be overwhelming because there are so many options, so they’re looking to put some structure in place.”

— Amy S., Operations Manager

“Can’t tell you how excited I am to be working with you [Optemization]. This is something I think could use a lot of improvement. So it’s nice to finally be on that path.”

— Colin M., Video Editor & Producer

Deals Database for Sales

A full replacement for HubSpot CRM, not just a supplementary view. All active deals, contacts, and organization records were migrated into Notion from both HubSpot and previous workspace setups. Everything was tightly connected across the Sales hub, and the team responded to it really positively — one of the most well-received builds of the engagement.

👥 Hiring & Onboarding System

Rather than building from scratch, the existing hiring and onboarding setup was reconnected to the rest of the workspace and aligned with the new permissions structure, turning an isolated tool into an integrated part of the broader system.

Housekeeping Automation

A behind-the-scenes automation that monitors pages created outside the official databases, moves them into the documents database, and nudges team members toward the right location. This quietly solved one of the team's biggest original pain points — pages getting buried in personal dashboards where no one could find them. It wasn't a formal project, but it shaped the long-term health of the workspace.

They'd been here before

Here's the thing: PerfectTed had already worked with a Notion consultant. A freelancer built their initial workspace before Optemization came in. It was a start, but as they kept growing, they quickly outgrew the solo approach.

Over time, the workspace structure didn’t scale with the company. New departments weren't set up. Sales still wasn't on Notion. And the team wanted more than fixes; they wanted a partner who could move as fast as they did.

That's when they came to Optemization, looking for an ongoing development partner that could keep up with a hyperscaling startup, not just a one-time build.

The shift from a one-time solo build to Optemization's LaunchHQ meant PerfectTed finally had the infrastructure to match their ambition.

Results and impact

Over 7 months and 17+ shipped projects, Optemization transformed PerfectTed's workspace:

✅ Built to scale

Workspace structured so new teams, departments, and markets slot right in — including a dedicated Global Markets department for international expansion.

✅ HubSpot CRM fully replaced in Notion

All active deals, contacts, and organizations were migrated into a native Notion system that the Sales team embraced, consolidating their tech stack and tightening cross-team visibility.

✅ Ops: zero to operational

From physical notebooks to managing projects, tasks, and handoffs in Notion.

✅ Sales onboarded for the first time

Simple workflows + Deals Database for a team that had never touched Notion.

✅ Cross-department visibility

Any team member can check status across departments — no more chasing updates.

✅ Final engagement evaluation: all green. Smooth close, no open blockers.

Documentation wrapping up, workspace fully adopted, and the team building strong governance habits ahead of the independent phase.

The Patreon video team went from a Notion workspace that people avoided to one that people actually opened every morning. Here's what changed:

✅ Notion became the centralized operational hub

The team streamlined handoffs so status updates, assignments, and reviews live in one place. Slack still plays a role, but it is no longer the only way to know what is happening.

✅ Visibility became tangible

Calendar views organized editor workloads, episode timelines, and upcoming deadlines in one place.

✅ Workflows brought consistency

With automation handling tedious updates, the team can trust what they see. If something shows In Review it is genuinely in review.

✅ Episode setup was streamlined into a one-input flow

Set the publish date, and the system handles the rest.

✅ Manual setup was reduced significantly

Creating a new episode used to mean duplicating templates and manually entering dates across subtasks. Now templates auto-populate deadlines relative to publish date, bringing consistency and reducing missed steps.

✅ Onboarding became straightforward

New team members can quickly understand where everything lives and how to move work forward.

✅ Editor capacity is visible for the first time

The operations manager now has a real-time dashboard showing who's booked, who's available, and what's coming up — enabling faster, more informed resourcing decisions across both staff and freelance editors.

✅ Published content no longer clutters the workspace

An archiving system keeps completed episodes out of active views, so the team only sees what's relevant right now.

What they said

"Thank you so much for this, and honestly for everything you've done with the team!

It's been such a valuable process for us, and the workspace is in a really strong place now, which is a huge credit to you. The team has got so much out of it, and I know it's going to make a big difference to how we operate day-to-day.

Also just really appreciate how you worked with everyone, you made it feel easy, practical and actually usable, which isn't always the case with these things!"

— Marisa Poster, Co-Founder at PerfectTed

Looking ahead

PerfectTed now has a workspace built to scale — not just for today, but for where they're headed. As they expand into new markets, launch new products, and grow their team, the infrastructure supports it all from a single platform.

For a brand that leads the global movement in matcha, the workspace finally has the energy to keep up.

🚀 Ready to give your team a workspace that actually works?

Book a free 30-minute call with Optemization and let's talk about what's possible.

Schedule a discovery call today